There is a dearth of documented methods and case studies for the creation of public-use health data. We describe a new methodology for creating a longitudinal public health dataset in the context of the Heritage Health Prize (HHP). The HHP is a global data mining competition to predict, by using claims data, the number of days patients will be hospitalized in a subsequent year. The winner will be the team or individual with the most accurate model past a threshold accuracy, and will receive a US $3 million cash prize. HHP began on April 4, 2011, and ends on April 3, 2013.

Medical Research Simplified - Medical research is complex, the search for it shouldn't have to be

The CBC is an interdisciplinary brain trust that brings together USC’s Keck School of Medicine and our world-renowned School of Cinematic Arts with the university’s schools of Business and Engineering. Our purpose is to creatively synthesize medicine, engineering, business, communications, and entertainment arts into new paradigms that will innovatively enhance the quality of life, especially for the 2 billion people worldwide who lack access to healthcare.

This new PEW report covers how the internet, and data, is changing healthcare. This includes the quantified self, of course, but also goes beyond that and puts it into the larger context of healthcare.

Cancers are also complex diseases. Individual tumours arise because of a number of different genetic mutations that build up over the years, potentially due to different causes. You can’t take a single patient and assign them to a “radiation” or “infection” or “smoking” bucket. Those 16.1% of cancers that are linked to infections may also have other “causes”. Cancer is more like poverty (caused by a number of events throughout one’s life, some inherited and some not) rather than malaria (caused by a very specific infection delivered via mosquito).

...................

I could do two sets of calculations using exactly the same methods and tell you how many cases of cancer were attributable to radon gas, or not eating enough fruit and vegetables. A casual passer-by might compare the two, look at which number was bigger, and draw conclusions about which risk factor was more important. But this would completely obscure the fact that there is very strong evidence that radon gas causes cancer, but only tenuous evidence that a lack of fruit and vegetables does. Comparing the two numbers makes absolutely no sense.